Ghazal for Dogeaters

Someone yelled, That dog gonna end up in a pot of rice!

at Margaret Cho & she tells the story in her stand-up, as a joke.

When I waited tables, someone’s dad ordered flied lice.

Someone’s brother made a dog-meat-in-the-eggrolls joke.

In 1904, they shipped twelve hundred Filipinos, shivering in

a train car, from Seattle to St. Louis for a human zoo. No joke.

They forced them to eat twenty dogs a week: a spectacle

for the fairgoers. The butt of the joke. The root of the joke.

Once a coworker barked like a dog because someone else

ate Chinese food; but calm down, it was just a joke.

When I told her it wasn’t OK, she cried, called me a bully.

She asked me in tears, Danni, why can’t you take a joke?